You can modify all those values as long as you don't change its size or adress. For example the local user pic is loaded from:

/dev_flash/vsh/resource/explore/user/000.png

But you can redirect it to load from USB for example:

/dev_usb/vsh/resource/explore/user/12345.png

The Cool Stuff

The retail PS3's registry contains all values to unlock the settings which are possible on a test/debug PS3 and even more like QA mode. We can enable those via the registry, but we won't see any effect in the XMB.

That is because we just UNLOCKED it, but different files on dev_flash handle what we can actually SEE in the XMB. So we need to modify them also to fully use debug options on a retail and more.

This can be done by mounting the dev_flash from USB. We need to do this as we can not write to the original dev_flash. So once we can load our customized dev_flash from USB and have modiified our registry, we have a nice way to load a our custom firmwares.

The Crash Report

The registry can contain an crash report which is seperatly splitted with another registry header as explained above. It contains system error messages, for example if you muck up your registry

PS3 Live USB CFW Theory

While the Jailbreak just changes mountpoints it should be possible to do the same for other places than the BDD, aswell.

For the JB, the drive is remounted @ HDD. So why not mount the dev_flash from USB?

Surely this is possible and I hope to see some action here soon!

So we would have a good solution to test and run custom firmwares as the brick risk is equal zero, because we can just unplug the USB device and the dev_flash is mounted as common - unchanged.

Sounds promising and hopefully they will find more on this, but next to remain to be seen is what sony is going to do and if they can shut down this exploit as the ps3 has been one tough cookie to crack so far and if it is sony will most likely be on the hunt to close it down, well time will tell and good luck to all hackers/developers on this project..may the force be with you..